Before I get to anything on Saturday’s game I have to commend the 12^th Man.  They were OUTSTANDING on Saturday night.  I wouldn’t call it the greatest performance ever but it was as solid as it comes considering the opponent.  Kyle Field was rocking and especially after the targeting call.  Kyle was buzzing most of the game but that targeting call turned Kyle into an all-out roar and one I think factored into the win.  If Fran was around every person in attendance would be receiving an MTXE t-shirt in the mail.  That’s Mental Toughness, Xtra (sic) Effort for those of you that have forgotten some of Fran’s greatest “motivation” tactics.  I still miss Fridays with Fran and Kim’s Corner.  Always nice to know what was going on with the coach and his wife since we weren’t winning.

This week’s write up is going to be shorter than normal because what happened on Saturday was what we’ve seen the last three games.  A8M came out lethargic and with no real plan or purpose.  Why that is I have no idea.  The 4^th quarter has a lot of people excited for the rest of the season but let’s pump the brakes a tad.  We were down at half in a home game against a pretty pedestrian South Carolina team.  A South Carolina team that I’d say has a MUCH worse offense than Arkansas and slightly better defense.  There was NO reason to go into half down 10-7 but yet we did.

Coming out of half it was the same thing.  No sense of urgency and no real plan.  We punted on our first two possessions of the second half while SoCar scored on their first possession of the second half to go up by 10.  A&M kicked a field goal towards the end of the third quarter to make it a 7 point game but there was still no sense of urgency.  Kyle still had a decent buzz but there was no urgency or apparent desire to impose our will.

That seemed to all change early in the 4^th quarter when Camron Buckley was ejected for targeting.  Per the letter of the rule the refs made the right call.  Buckley wasn’t intentionally targeting I don’t think but when you’re leading with your head towards higher up on a person and you make contact with their helmet you’re more than likely going to get called.  It’s a gray area for player safety but it’s the rule.  Ironically I think his ejection was the difference in the game as Kyle Field turned into an all-out roar and the A&M team all of a sudden had a sense of urgency and purpose.  Sad that it took that to get the team a sense of urgency but I really think that changed the game.  We scored two plays later to tie it up and then dominated the rest of the game but still only won by 7 so the final emotion everyone felt hides the reality of the game in my mind.

Offense:

For three quarters this offense looked really ho hum.  No real plan and no sense of urgency.  After three quarters at Kyle Field against a decent but not great SoCar defense we had 10 points.  TEN POINTS.  Against a decent team we’re not down just 7 in the 4^th quarter and we don’t score 14 in the 4^th quarter to win the game.  At least I don’t think.  The offense seems to respond to the defense’s effort and that needs to change at some point.  The offense needs to have its own urgency and plan.  The end result was fine with 24 points and a 7 point win but the complete game picture still creates cause for concern from an offensive standpoint.

Kellen Mond from a passing standpoint was fairly accurate completing 19 of 27 passes but he only passed for 159 yards so he wasn’t exactly lighting it up with deep balls.  A lot of smart passes from him which was good to see but despite the 70% completion rate I wouldn’t paint this as a dominant passing effort.  It almost seems SoCar played a solid defense to keep him contained through the air knowing where he would go but maybe I’m wrong.  Will Muschamp isn’t a great head coach but he’s still a pretty defensive guy so that SoCar defense kept Mond contained for the most part since we only scored 10 points through 3 quarters and no big passing plays through the whole game.  Our longest passes were for 26 and 21 yards with no other pass over 20 yards.

Mond did have an outstanding day running the ball rushing 15 times for 106 yards if you take away the sack.  That’s about 7 yards per rush and even more impressive was his longest run was only 19 yards so he was pretty consistent running the ball.  You’d like to see him break one for a long run like Johnny or Trevor but he doesn’t have their breakaway speed and was taking what the defense was giving it seemed.  Mond was pretty consistent running and only getting sacked once so it says he was making decent reads.  Not dominating but he’s still a true freshman playing behind an offensive line that isn’t exactly dominating either.

Keith Ford was our best back for the game rushing 12 times for 71 yards and two touchdowns.  He was great in the red zone scoring our final two touchdowns to put us up.  Trayveon seemed a little hesitant at times as I think he kept waiting for bigger holes to develop that never did.  He and Ford are different backs where Ford hits the hole immediately like a singles hitter just wanting to get on base.  Trayveon waits a little longer to see if something bigger develops as he likes to hit for extra bases and especially home runs.  They’re great complements to each other assuming Mazzone or Sumlin is using them based on how the game is being played.

In the 4^th quarter for whatever reason we finally decided to pound the ball.  We ran 20 plays in the 4^th quarter with 15 being runs and 5 being passes.  The passes were solid completions but I don’t think it’s a surprise we scored 14 points on back to back possessions down 7 because we decided to commit to the running game.  I get having balance so the defense doesn’t focus on stopping one aspect but at some point its okay to go with what seems to be the strength of this team which is running the ball.  We run the ball much better than we can pass and I still haven’t figured out why we’re so afraid to use the run game to set up the pass.  Had we committed to running against Arkansas and SoCar in the 1^st quarter and all game I don’t think those are close games in the 4^th quarter that we win by 7.  We beat UCLA as well if we keeping running the ball in the second half.

Receiver and offensive line was more of the same from the ULaLa and Arkansas games.  Pretty consistent play but not dominant.  The worse move was they once again went with a true freshman offensive line early in the 2^nd quarter I believe.  They accounted for 2 incompletions and a sack.  I hope that grouping of offensive linemen never sees the field together again as they have accounted for three and outs the last three times they’ve seen the field.  We’d be better off kneeling three times and punting to let the clock run and minimize contact on our offensive players.  I don’t understand it at all.  We hear it’s for conditioning but if 1-2 series a game is supposed to pay off in November we’re in bigger trouble than we think.  We’re bringing them in when the game is in question and continually wasting a series with that grouping.  It’s maddening and at this point its insanity doing the same thing expecting different results.

I’m still not sure this offense takes a leap from what we’ve seen the last three games.  There’s promise but there’s still just so much inconsistency in the play calling and execution.  I’m not sure we see a dominant game from start to finish unless we commit to the run much earlier and stick with it.  I have a feeling against Bama we’re going to have to go away from the run as they shut it down and get ahead so we have to play catch up through the air.  Not sticking to the run against Bama won’t help us against Florida which I’ll get to in a little bit.

Defense:

Other than a few plays this was an outstanding defensive performance.  Without a doubt our best effort all season but make no mistake South Carolina might be the worst SEC offense we see all season.  I’m dead serious.  That was a REALLY bad South Carolina offense.  Every SEC team we play from here on out will be better than this one.  South Carolina was missing their starting right tackle and starting right guard.  In addition they were missing their best offensive player in wide receiver Deebo Samuel.  Jake Bentley is a decent quarterback but he’s no world beater for sure.  Ettlinger at LSU might be worse but he has a MUCH better supporting cast.

With that, the defense still deserves credit for playing 4 quarters of really good football.  We held SoCar to 256 yards and they had four plays that accounted for 131 yards.  That’s over 50% of their yards in four plays out of roughly 56 offensive plays.  So for 52 plays they averaged less than 2.5 yards per play.  That’s DAMN good.  Even if the SoCar offense isn’t all that great that’s a defense that stepped up and dominated when opportunity presented itself.  That’s way better than the Sex Panther defense I thought this group was.  93% of the time our defense worked every time.  Kudos to the unit as if they don’t step up and dominate those 52 plays there’s a good chance we lose this game.

As for individuals our defensive tackles took care of business like always.  They were excellent.  Their play allowed Alaka and Dodson to have outstanding games.  Alaka had the game of his life with 7 solo tackles and 2 assisted tackles including 2 sacks.  Dodson was our second leading tackler with 4 solos and 1 assisted.  That’s awesome when our linebackers are our leading tacklers as opposed to our defensive backs like last week.  Landis Durham continues to show up giving a presence at defensive end I didn’t think we’d have coming into the season.  He got two sacks which so he continues to bring pressure to the quarterback.  In total we had 7 sacks so even if that was the worst SEC offense we’ll see all season we took advantage and brought big time pressure.

No defensive back really stood out.  Kind of surprised we didn’t pick a pass off but that’s okay.  Bentley completed a little better than 50% which isn’t bad but pretty obvious we had decent coverage all game.  Other than the 45 yard touchdown which was a broken play we had solid coverage all night.  This wasn’t really a game for the defensive backs to stand out considering SoCar ran the ball 26 times and passed 30 times so they were balanced and got nothing on the ground.  I would have liked to have seen a lower yards per completion but this is an era of college football where teams are going to get yards through the air.  This was a game for the front seven to shine and they definitely did that.

I’m not back on the Chief Train yet but I am at the station wondering if he’s gonna get the thing chugging along again.  I know this goes against what I said earlier but at this point in seeing the defense I think he just needs to channel his inner Wade Phillips and dial up pressure after pressure.  If we give up big plays so be it.  I think this defense plays best with its ears pinned back.  Might as well pin them back and see what happens.  With Durham, Alaka, Dodson, Pryor, and even Jarret Johnson stepping up we might as well see what we can do.  It won’t matter against Bama but we don’t need to get dejected if Bama trucks us and get back to bringing the pressure when we roll into Gainesville.  We should pin our ears back against Bama but if we aren’t successful we shouldn’t change the approach.  Just know it’ll get easier against teams not named Bama.

Special Teams:

Once again nothing special here.  Kirk had a botched punt but other than that he never attempted a return.  He never had a chance to make a return so we’re not getting any return blocking at all.  I still contend we need to attempt a block just to keep their punt coverage team honest in staying home.  It looks like they’re releasing multiple guys down the field and we’re having problems blocking them.  For the last 14 punts we’ve had ZERO attempts at a return.

South Carolina had a couple decent kick returns against us so we didn’t execute on those two kickoffs.  We had one return were Christian Kirk took it out from the end zone and only got 10 yards so we started an offensive drive at the 10 yard line.  That’s not good.  Night and day from Arkansas.

I thought Tripucka had his worst game this season as he had a chance to pin SoCar inside their 20 yard line but instead kicked it into the end zone.  He did get the 3 punts inside the 20 but his specialty has always been his ability to pin an offense inside the 20.  He failed twice this game which isn’t terrible but we should really be perfect never kicking a punt into the end zone.  He was 60% pinning teams inside the 20.  Know what is also effective 60% of the time?  Sex Panther.  We don’t need our punter turning into a Ron Burgundy bit.  Just pin the opponent inside the 20.

Going Forward:

Despite what happened in the 4^th quarter I expect Bama to truck us.  They’re flat out rolling right now.  They beat Florida State 24-7 to open up the season and then in their last two SEC games have won 59-0 and 66-3.  I know that’s Vandy and Ole Miss but let’s not kid ourselves we’re light years better than those teams.  We’re definitely better but those are ass kickings.  Bama is firing on all cylinders while we’re playing inconsistent football.  Nick Saban doesn’t have let down games and I expect them to throttle us 44-10.

They’ll get a least one defensive touchdown and one special teams touchdown I think.  Our defense will do an admirable job for a portion of the game but Bama will just wear us down.  Our offense will completely sputter other than a couple of drives.  I know anything can happen but this is Bama up against a lesser talented and less consistent A&M offense from last year.  We didn’t do so well last year when it was all said and done.  Our only chance is having a plan to give Keith Ford the ball at least 20 times this game.  If we don’t do that that tells me Sumlin and Mazzone can’t make honest assessments of our offense and opponents from film.  Normally I’d say you have to take to the air against Bama and play tempo but I don’t think we have the quarterback and receivers to do that.  Just pound Ford and see what happens.  Maybe our defense can hold and Ford can wear down the Bama defense.  Even if he doesn’t it’ll be good practice to practice a focused runing for the remaining games on the schedule.  Yes, I’m serious about using a Bama loss to benefit the rest of the season.  Challenge our offensive line against the best defensive front in college football.

After Bama the only other sure loss I see on the schedule right now is Auburn.  Malzahn appears to have that team rolling as well.  Anything can happen but that’s a talented Auburn team that seems to be playing up to its potential.  That puts our ceiling at 9-3 in my mind needing to get wins over Florida, Miss St, Ole Miss, and LSU.  Those all look like winnable games right now but I still feel we split those or at best go 3-1 which will put as at 8-4.

We’ll just have to see how we respond in Gainesville after Bama.  If we can squeeze a win in Florida which is entirely possible then 9-3 is a lot more possible.  Even though Florida doesn’t look like a great team that won’t be an easy game going on the road the week after Bama.  Both Mississippi schools look very beatable so I’d say 7-5 is our floor right now.

The wild card is obviously LSU because they look terrible right now.  I mean they just look terrible.  They still have plenty of time to get focused and that’s a talented team.  I FULLY expect Ed Orgeron to coach every practice shirtless from here on out threatening to whip every Tiger player’s ass that doesn’t give max effort.  I really do.  No more mumbling and eating gumbo during practice.  It’s Shirtless Ed threatening to whip the ass of every Tiger player that’s not focused on getting better.  I’m kind of hoping he might even coach shirtless but I don’t think the NCAA will allow that happen.  I’d love to see Ed Orgeron shirtless on the sidelines in a game.  I think the NCAA needs to rethink that rule about coaching attire.  College football needs Shirtless Ed.

If you watched the game on Saturday you were fortunate enough to watch paid professionals fail miserably at their job for around 4 hours.  This includes the highest paid people in Kevin Sumlin and Bret Bielema down to the refs.  Fortunately for the Aggies, Bielema is a bigger moron than Sumlin.  As for the refs, in the end they kind of balanced out their terrible calls.  Kind of.   They were still pretty bad.  It wasn’t a pretty game to watch from a competence standpoint but from a sheer entertainment it was pretty good.

I’ve been telling you this Aggie football season is like the 2016 Presidential Election and Saturday was a perfect example of that.  The two candidates showed their incompetence time and time again and in this game the moderators also showed off their incompetence with repeated bad calls.  I wish I had the time to go back and log every dumb decision but I don’t have the time since nobody pays me for this.  Just know it was sheer incompetence.

To me the most glaring three examples were late in the game when Arkansas kicked directly to Christian Kirk and he promptly took it back to the house for the Aggie lead.  I mean they kicked it right to him.  After taking the lead to go up by 3 with three and a half minutes left and A&M with two timeouts Arkansas decides to sky kick just on the other side of midfield giving A&M a short field only needing a field goal to tie.  It was such a moronic call.

A&M then promptly drives down and sets up a game tying field goal but Kevin Sumlin then calls timeout with 8 seconds left.  In the end it didn’t matter but why Sumlin didn’t wait until 3 seconds left to call the timeout is beyond me.  That would have ensured the field goal attempt was the final play of the game.  Now, the odds of Arkansas returning the kick for a score are miniscule but anyone that’s watched football remembers the Music City Miracle and the Stanford/Cal game where strange things can happen on kick offs.  There was no need for that to even be an option as Sumlin should have just let the clock wind down to 3 seconds and call the timeout.  Good or bad the field goal would be the last play and Arkansas would only see the ball in overtime if it got there.  I think it just goes to show Sumlin is not fully aware of the entire game situation.

It’s still a win for A&M and six straight for Sumlin over Arkansas including yet another overtime “thriller.”  If this was going to be Sumlin’s last game against Arkansas it’s only fitting it went to overtime.  It may not be pretty but it sure was entertaining when all of the smoke settled.

Offense:

My main takeaway from this game is how inconsistent this offense still is.  Some of it is play calling but some of it is execution.  Kellen Mond was 14 of 27 passing which is the model of inconsistency in my mind.  50% isn’t bad but it’s not exactly great either.  He had some good passes but also had some stinkers along with guys dropping a couple passes they should have had.  He did enough to win the game so there’s something to be said for a true freshman that seems to be growing each week.  Still a long ways to go but needless to say Arkansas Kellen Mond is light years above UCLA Kellen Mond.  He’s going to face defenses a LOT better than this Arkansas defense so we’ll see how much further he can develop.

Something else on Mond is he’s not the running threat I thought he’d be.  I know he’s young but speed is speed.  Based on his long run against Arkansas on Saturday if you lined him up with Johnny and Trevor in a 100 yard dash he’d get smoked.  He really would.  He’s a decent runner but I don’t think he’s as strong a runner as Jalen Hurts was in his true freshman season last year.  I think Mond is the better passer than those guys not named Manziel but I thought he’d be faster based on what was said when he was recruited.  Just don’t expect him to have the long runs those guys have had.  It’s not who he is apparently.

For the rest of the offense I thought they looked decent but I don’t think the Arkie defense is that stellar.  50 points is 50 points but I don’t think there’s going to be any games left in the SEC where we score 50 points and with our defense we might need it.  We ran the ball decently but I didn’t think we were dominant by any stretch.  It certainly wasn’t as strong as we did against UCLA in the first half.  We got good push on most plays and had some really decent runs but I don’t feel we were blowing holes open like we could have.  This was not the dominant run effort we had last year against Arkansas and I was surprised by that.  If Mond hadn’t had some decent passes we walk out of JerryWorld losers no doubt.  Not dissing Ford or Trayveon at all as it wasn’t from lack of effort but I’ve seen better run games the last two years.

At receiver it was much like Mond where there were some good moments and some not so good moments for people who don’t have the last name of Kirk.  Kirk is a bonafide stud.  End of story.  Surprisingly Damion Ratley appears to be the second best receiver on the team right now.  He’s made some solid catches and this is a guy I didn’t trust to catch balls coming into the season.  The true freshmen are progressing but still inconsistent which is too be expected.  I think this Arkie defense is pretty bad and the receiving corps is going to find it much tougher sledding as we get through the rest of the SEC schedule.

The OLine looked decent except for the true freshman offensive line they ran out there twice which I believe resulted in negative 9 yards of offense and two punts.  Supposedly Sumlin’s justification was that he wanted to keep the starting offensive line fresh.  Um, do what?  Didn’t we hire the most awesome conditioning coach in the universe this offseason?  Did they really get that big of a rest considering the results?  This is a decision I don’t get at all.  It’s basically raising the white flag on two offensive possessions in a back and forth game.  I’m sure our defense loved seeing those guys go out there knowing the starting offensive line was getting some “rest.”  The defense got minimal rest with that unit in there.  Sumlin can’t allow that the rest of the way.  I swear he’s an idiot for touting conditioning all off season and then running a spare offensive line out there because the starters aren’t in good enough shape.  You can’t have it both ways, Kevin.

The other thing that really bothered me about this game was the backside defensive end was making a lot of plays during the game.  He’s the guy we’re supposed to be reading and what I noticed him doing quite a bit was crashing to Mond and not to the running back.  When Mond would see him coming directly at him Mond would leave the ball with the running back and then the defensive end would adjust and tackle the running back for no gain or a slight gain.  It didn’t always happen but it happened quite a bit where I’m now worried Arkie put on film a way to confuse our read game.  Now, this is also the reason Mond had his long run because Mond was able to get around him when he couldn’t hold contain from crashing but it was still a pretty effective move to basically crash to Mond so that he handed the ball off rather than hold.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens the rest of the way with this offense as I think Mond will continue to develop but I don’t think his ceiling is much more than what we saw here.  He’ll make some smarter decisions and likely get better passing but it’s not going to be what we’ve seen happen in the ULaLa game and continue in the Arkie game from an improvement standpoint.  He’s going to face tougher and tougher defenses and his development is going to slow quite a bit.

As for the rest of the offense I still believe this will be an offense that can’t continually sustains drives.  That’s just not how Mazzone is.  Case in point the continual deep ball on first down to open up a series where the ball wasn’t even close or the receiver had no separation.  There was no check down if the receiver was covered.  Just gun it down and hope for the best.  I believe there were at least 4 of those including the 4^th quarter where I thought he should have just lined up and leaned on Arkansas.  Not once in that game do I think we really tried to lean on Arkansas and impose our will.  If Mazzone doesn’t think we can do it against Arkansas he’s not going to think we can do it against anyone else on our schedule.

Defense:

I officially got off the Chavis Train on Saturday.  Now, the train is at the station just stopped and I can still get back on but what I saw on Saturday really bothered me.  That wasn’t a great Arkansas offense and we continually let them back in the game.  It wasn’t just a couple of series.  We continually had chances to step up as a defense and we didn’t do it hence why we went to overtime.

What happened is very confusing to me.  It’s total inconsistency.  About 60 percent of the plays we’re a damn good defense.  I mean real good.  We had 6 sacks so we were bringing pressure which is great.  They also only converted 5 of 13 third downs which is also pretty good.  However, the other 40 percent of the plays we give up way too much.  While Sex Panther is an outstanding cologne for a date it’s not an outstanding strategy for a defense.  That’s an Anchorman movie reference if you’ve never seen it.  What’s even more maddening is it’s the same issues over and over again.  It just seems like feast or famine with this defense and teams exploit the same thing over and over again.

The most maddening thing is the failure to account for the running back flaring out of the backfield.  It’s not even a true wheel route.  A lot of times they’ll just release the back into the flats and nobody at all accounts for him.  The QB will spot him and dump him the ball and off he goes for a pretty decent gain.  They also used it to score a goal line touchdown.  This has been going on since the Tennessee game last year and at least once a game it bites us if not multiple times a game.  How we lose awareness of the running back when he’s not blocking is beyond me.  Yet it happens time and time again.

We gave up 451 yards to what I feel isn’t a very good Arkansas offense.  It was equally split so it’s not like they exploited us through the ground or air.  The just had a fairly consistent attack that leveraged weaknesses in our defense.  I really think it’s time for Sumlin to do an honest assessment of Chavis and give him more direction of what to do in the game.  Sumlin doesn’t like doing that especially to someone of Chavis’ caliber but from what I’ve seen since the Tennessee game he’s not always on his game.  He’s still really damn good most of the game but it’s clear offenses know when to pull out plays that our defense won’t be prepared for or exploit our aggressiveness.  Chavis is getting the better of offensive coordinators most of the time but when he’s not it’s pretty bad.  He hasn’t called a complete defensive game since his first season in my mind.

From an individual standpoint our safeties Watts and Pryor led the way in tackles.  Watts is a total stud and Pryor is playing great but it’s becoming a bit concerning when both of our safeties are our leading tacklers.  Behind them our corners of Myles Jones and Debione Renfro led the team in solo tackles.  That’s not a good thing when your secondary is 4 of the Top 5 tacklers.  I want the front 7 making more tackles than my secondary and especially my corners.  Credit to the corners for making lots of tackles on outside running plays where Arkansas was blocking our front 7 but you’d hope a linebacker has more tackles than a corner for a team that was running as much as Arkansas.  They attempted 45 runs and 27 passes so our corners were very involved in stopping the run.  It shouldn’t be that way.

Outside of the secondary I thought Tyrel Dodson had some nice stops at times but he also gets sucked in places where he shouldn’t be and gets taken out of plays.  Kingsley Keke and Landis Durham were our best defensive linemen by far and Durham looked really good at times with 2 sacks.  Durham has really impressed me this season.  Daylon Mack got credit for no tackles including not even having an assisted tackle.  That’s really bad.

If Arkansas can score 43 points on this defense I shudder to think what some of the more “explosive” offenses in the SEC can score on us.  By explosive I mean quarterbacks that can both run and pass.  Austin Allen isn’t a running quarterback at all but yet Arkansas was able to rush for 265 yards against us and this isn’t even close to one of Bielema’s best offensive lines.  In fact I’d say it’s his worst in the 5 years he’s been at Arkansas.

I don’t know if it’s a talent issue or a coaching issue but Chavis’ defenses have gotten progressively worse since he’s been in Aggieland.  I still want to believe in Chief and get back on the Chief Train but right now I think that train is broke down in the station and it’s not leaving anytime soon.  Well, other than at the end of the season which will make me sad as I’ll miss hearing from Chief.  I won’t eat until the prey is dead Chief.  I promise you that.

Special Teams:

Before I get to anything else on special teams the decision or lack of execution to kick to Christian Kirk was one of the bigger moronic decisions I’ve ever seen in a football game.  It reminded me of when R.C. kicked to Wes Welker with a 4^th quarter lead and Welker ran it back.  Some people are just electric and you don’t give them a chance late in games when you’re holding a lead.  Thank you to whoever on Arkansas was responsible for kicking to Kirk.  The amazing thing on that return from what I’ve seen is there was no real blocking scheme to open up a real hole.  The other kick return guys did an outstanding job of just engaging everyone from Arkansas on that side of the field and Kirk found a seam and turned on his jets.  That play was 50% Arkansas brain fart, 10% Aggie return team blocking, and 40% Christian Kirk just using his God given ability.  The dude can fly.  Did you know that was Sumlin’s first kick return for a touchdown since he’s been at A&M?  That’s pretty unreal.

I’ve said it all year but our special teams don’t impress me as a unit.  There’s some fine individual players but as a unit I still don’t think the special teams is all that great.  LaCamera was 3-3 so that was solid.  Sure, they were shorter kicks but he did his job.  I think Tripucka had one short kick off his foot but for the most part he was his usual solid self.

The most frustrating part about the special teams in this game was the punt returns.  For the most part Arkansas was punting to Kirk but they did an outstanding job of getting solid coverage before Kirk caught the ball.  Kirk didn’t attempt a single punt return all day because Arkansas guys were running unblocked down the field.  Kirk either let the ball go or fair caught it.  He never returned a single ball because he couldn’t get to it with any space from an Arkansas defender.   7 times Arkansas punted and not once did we get any kind of return.  Their punter averaged 43.9 yards per kick and punted two over 50 yards so they were kicking to Kirk with space but their coverage was outstanding.  They were getting generous rolls when Kirk didn’t field them but they weren’t punting away from Kirk.

How we couldn’t get any blocking on punt returns is frustrating.  If I were Sumlin or Banks I would have loaded up 10 guys on the line and gone for a blocked punt while telling Kirk to fair catch it if he safely could.  We weren’t returning any kicks so might as well go for a jailbreak block to see what happens.  I haven’t seen us block a punt in I don’t know how long.

There were a few other special teams mishaps here and there as well.  We have some solid individuals on special teams but I still feel our special teams units under perform when it comes to all 11 players executing.  Christian Kirk isn’t running back kicks against every team this season.  Either way that was an awesome return and if an NFL scout was watching that just confirmed his next level speed.  He’s got it and thank goodness on Saturday he was wearing maroon.  If Kirk played for Alabama he’d likely be a Top 5 Heisman candidate right now.  He really is that good from a physical talent standpoint.  I just wished we were able to exploit that talent more.

Going Forward:

I still think this is a 7-5 team mainly because this team is so inconsistent.  There’s some potential to win 8 games but I don’t see it happening.   I think we beat South Carolina this weekend to get to 4 wins and then there’s the New Mexico game which will get us 5.  We’ll lose to Alabama which will put us at 5-2 with games against Florida, Mississippi St, Auburn, Ole Miss, and LSU.  I see us going 2-3 in that stretch but it’s really possible to go 3-2 if we get some consistency on offense or defense especially.  I don’t see 4-1 or 5-0 against those teams right now but could be wrong.  While there’s some promise the reality is still that we’re coming off a 50-43 overtime win against Arkansas.  If Bret Bielema has any real brain cells the Aggies lose that game.  Kevin Sumlin was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat simply because Bret Bielema is a moron.  I mean it takes a special kind of moron to kick to Christian Kirk late in the 4^th quarter when you’re trying to protect a lead.  Congratulations Bret.  You gave us Aggies hope.

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